Cronos Rising (2 page)

That was what embassies were for, to a large extent. They provided an inviolable base on foreign territories from which the Great Game could be played out.

David Billson, though, was more than a British spy in Rome. He was a British spy in Rome who was providing intelligence to the Chinese government.

Whether he was a true double agent, working for the Beijing regime, or whether he was a mercenary selling information to the highest bidder, wasn’t clear. Nor was it particularly relevant, as far as Purkiss was concerned. Purkiss’s remit was to obtain evidence that Billson was providing information to a man named Xing Ho Lee, a teacher at one of the local Chinese schools here in Rome. Lee was known to the British and US authorities to have an affiliation with the Ministry of State Security, the intelligence service of the People’s Republic of China.

And, forty minutes earlier, Purkiss had witnessed Lee handing over a briefcase to David Billson, in the hushed confines of the Galleria Spada.

The handover had been professionally done, neither man interacting with the other, but both ending up side by side and gazing at the gallery’s Brueghel collection. Lee was instantly recognisable to Purkiss, who’d studied pictures of his appearance just as he had those of Billson prior to arriving in Rome. Lee had lowered the briefcase to the floor neatly, bending his knees the way you were always taught to do rather than curving his back. After a couple of minutes studying the Brueghel pictures, he’d walked away. Billson himself had waited a similar time before picking up the briefcase without looking down at it. Purkiss watched him clip the chain attached to the handle of the briefcase smoothly around his wrist.

Purkiss had followed Billson through the brightly lit streets and across the Tiber into Borgo,  where Billson paused on the river bank. Purkiss wondered about this. Was the man meeting somebody else there? If so, snatching the briefcase might mean walking into a trap. So Purkiss had scouted around the point where Billson was standing and looking out over the river, and had carried out every counter-surveillance manoeuvre he knew. When he was as satisfied as he could be that Billson wasn’t being watched, Purkiss closed in.

The bolt cutters in his pocket were a standard piece of kit he employed when following a target. You never knew when a mark might be observed to padlock something in a locker, or pass through a gate which he then secured behind him. In this case, the briefcase was chained to Billson’s wrist, and the bolt cutters would allow Purkiss to remove the case without having to go through the tedious process of finding out where the man kept the key to the lock.

Purkiss lengthened his stride as he came into the final few yards of his run. Billson would hear him, or sense him, at the last minute, he knew, and so it was essential he built up enough momentum that he’d retain the advantage of surprise long enough to prevent a defensive move by his target.

And, sure enough, Purkiss saw Billson’s head start to turn when he was five paces away.

Purkiss’s right fist connected with the back of Billson’s neck with perhaps seventy per cent of the maximum force it could deliver. At the same time, Purkiss gripped the man’s left arm, the one holding the briefcase, with his own left hand and jerked it upwards. Billson slammed forward against the stone wall overlooking the river as Purkiss dipped his right hand into his pocket and pulled out the bolt cutters and used their jaws to snap efficiently through the lightweight chain securing the briefcase to Billson’s left wrist. As he did so, he applied torque to the arm, twisting it ever upwards and anticlockwise until the fingers of Billson’s left hand opened involuntarily and he released the handle of the case.

Purkiss released the arm and caught the briefcase deftly by the handle with his left hand. He dropped the bolt cutters back in his pocket to free up his right hand and raised it, prepared for a counterattack by Billson. But his blow to the man’s neck had been effective, not quite knocking the man unconscious but stunning him. Billson slumped against the stone wall, his hands gripping the top to keep himself from sliding down. He didn’t look round, but rather shook his head as if in dazed wonder.

Purkiss ran.

He headed back the way he’d come, in a straight line away from Billson and directly behind him, so that the man would have to turn round fully to see him. The side street from which Purkiss had emerged, and into which he now plunged once more, led to a short maze of unlit alleys. Purkiss dodged and weaved, taking a different route from the one he’d followed while checking for surveillance earlier, before he came out on a broader thoroughfare. There he slowed, controlling his breathing, dropping to a purposeful stride. An informally dressed man sprinting though the streets with a briefcase in his hand would arouse suspicion at the very least, and might even trigger pursuit.

When once again Purkiss was confident he wasn’t being followed, he entered a small piazza, one he didn’t recognise but which probably, like most places in Rome, had some historical story attached to it. The square held a scattering of evening strollers, mainly tourists by the look of them. No police.

Purkiss sat on a stone bench and examined the briefcase. It was a plain leather one, neither brand-new nor battered, with two combination locks. He took a Swiss Army knife from another of his pockets and jemmied the hasps open, ruining the locks in the process.

Vale had instructed Purkiss to procure evidence that Billson was being paid for information by the Chinese. He hadn’t told him to examine that evidence himself, but Purkiss knew he was justified in opening the briefcase, and that Vale would see it the same way.

The case was full of paper, but not in the form of banknotes.

Instead, there were reams of A4 and A5. Some had Chinese characters printed on them, in the format of text or letterheads or sometimes both. Some of them were completely blank.

Purkiss didn’t read or speak Mandarin, or Cantonese, or any other Chinese language. He’d therefore need to keep the paper for scrutiny by somebody able to interpret the writings.

But he was fairly certain the writing was junk. That the paper in the briefcase was just that. Paper. Filler.

Purkiss placed the contents carefully on the bench beside him. He set to work inspecting the briefcase itself. The inner lining, the leather exterior. The handle.

There were no hidden compartments. No flash drives stitched into the seams. No microdots secreted behind the metal rivets.

Purkiss replaced the stack of paper in the case, closed it, and, holding it shut beneath one arm, made his way out of the piazza.

*

H
e didn’t go back to his hotel room. He’d done a comprehensive sweep for bugs, which had come up clear, but this latest development changed everything.

He had to assume his hotel was under surveillance.

Instead, Purkiss took a metro train to the Trevi Rione. It was a quiet area, but not so desolate that anybody could make a move on him without being seen. He found a cafe and sat at a window table with a clear view of the street. The noise level in the place was just enough that it would interfere with any long-range audio device which might be used to try to eavesdrop on his conversation.

Any
known
audio device. The Chinese regime might have, and probably did have, access to technology far in advance of anything the Western or even the Russian intelligence services were aware of.

Purkiss called the only number on his phone. Vale’s number.

During the silence that followed his thumbing of the key, Purkiss again ran through the scenario which had played out, and the possibilities it threw up.

David Billson, the suspected MI6 traitor, had received a briefcase in a clandestine manner from a man known to have links with the Beijing government. That briefcase had turned out to be filled not with money but with decoy material.

It meant either that Billson had been duped, or that the whole thing was a charade. One designed to trick an observer into believing that Billson was being paid by Chinese Intelligence.

The first possibility was so unlikely as to be almost instantly dismissable. If the Chinese were offering to buy information from Billson but reneging on the deal, why go to the lengths of handing over a briefcase full of supposed cash? All Billson would do would be to open the briefcase hours, or minutes, or even seconds after the handover, and discover he’d been ripped off. It would be far less complicated for his Chinese contact simply not to turn up. Presumably, Billson would have no redress. He couldn’t exactly approach his own people, or walk into the Chinese embassy in the city, and complain that he’d been tricked.

So Purkiss assumed the handover of the briefcase was for his, Purkiss’s, benefit. Which meant the Chinese, and very likely Billson himself, knew Purkiss was in Rome and had Billson under surveillance.

That in turn meant one of two things. Either Purkiss had slipped up somewhere, and his surveillance of Billson over the last three days since he’d arrived in Rome had been noted. Or - and this was of greater concern - there had been a security breach at some other, higher, level.

Purkiss had no idea what that “higher level” might mean. He was a freelancer, an independent operator who had once worked for MI6 but was now paid directly by Quentin Vale, a man who was himself once a British Intelligence agent. Vale’s current relationship with MI6 and the British government in general was unclear to Purkiss. Though Vale had access to funding and logistics which seemed impossible for a private citizen, he’d always given the impression to Purkiss that he was no longer in the employ of the official intelligence services. Purkiss believed Vale was answerable to some other governmental body, perhaps the Foreign Office or even the Cabinet Office itself.

It wasn’t Purkiss’s concern. His job, for the last six years, had been to track down and neutralise the rogue elements within British Intelligence. The ideological turncoats, the mercenaries, the petty criminals.

Purkiss listened through the silence, waiting for the ringing to start at the other end. Either Vale would pick up within a ring or two, or the call would go to voicemail. In which latter case, Purkiss would pause for two seconds before ending the call. He never left a message. Vale would call him back as soon as he got a chance.

The rising three-note squeak jarred in Purkiss’s ear. A robotic woman’s voice, English-accented, said:
‘Sorry. This number is not available.’

Purkiss listened to the sequence repeat itself.

He thumbed the
end call
icon on the screen of his phone.

For a moment he stared at the window of the cafe, at his face half reflected in the glass.

He popped open the back of his phone and removed the battery and went to the toilet at the back of the cafe and dropped the battery into the bowl. Piling a wad of toilet paper on top of it, he flushed. Waited for the cistern to fill up. Flushed again.

He strode out of the cafe, feeling the chill hit his exposed skin - it was as if the temperature had dropped from southern-European October balminess to something altogether colder - and broke the body of the phone apart between his fingers, scattering the pieces.

Vale’s number wasn’t available.

That had never happened before. Not in six years.

Vale had been compromised.

Which meant Purkiss himself was cut off.

Exposed.

A church loomed ahead of Purkiss. Tiny by Roman standards, it was nevertheless spectacularly striking, in that typical Italian way. In the north of the continent, where the iconography was darker, more primeval, such a church would have sported gargoyles leering from its walls.

Above the doors, an ornate Christ in bas-relief grimaced, the terrible torment of its expression enhanced by the sculpted gore that leaked from its widespread, transfixed hands.

––––––––

P
urkiss spent the next three hours crossing the city following the most chaotic of routes, chaotic in the sense of random, unpredictable. When he noticed he’d been following an approximate figure-of-eight path, he changed it drastically to a diagonal zig-zag. When he found himself once again at one or other bank of the Tiber, he headed for the outer suburbs.

Absolute certainty was an impossibility in Purkiss’s line of work. But by eleven o’clock, with the crowds thinning on the piazzas and the residential streets darkening, he was as positive as he could be that he wasn’t under surveillance.

He felt the urge to dispose of his clothes, to scrub himself in a shower somewhere, in case some kind of monitoring device had been secreted about his clothing or even implanted in his skin. He felt the urge, and he resisted it, because that was where normal healthy paranoia segued into madness. He’d known agents who had succumbed to that degree of fear, a corroding force which eventually became paralysing.

In the last hour before midnight, Purkiss found a tiny hotel on an authentically cobbled street in the Ludovisi district. In the reception area, barely as big as a kitchenette in a studio flat, he asked the sleepy woman behind the desk for a room for the night.

He ascended the vertiginous stairs and inserted the old-fashioned key into the lock, stepped inside, and braced himself for the brilliant flash of light and noise which never came.

Get a grip
, he told himself.

The room held a single bed with a sagging, too-soft mattress, a single chair, and a dresser with a telephone and portable television set. Purkiss drew the thin curtains across the window, finding them inadequate to the task of blotting out the light from the street lamp directly outside. He sat on the edge of the bed and took stock.

His single suitcase was back at his original hotel. All it held were a couple of changes of clothes and his toiletries. His passport, and his wallet, were in the pocket of the duffel jacket he was wearing. He had the briefcase with its prised-open locks and the most likely worthless scrap paper inside.

He needed to get back to Britain, but he didn’t know how vulnerable he’d be at the airports. He could take a train out of Italy, but the stations might be under surveillance.